I am but a single voice, and I know the effect I could potentially have is only a long-term campaign.

However, I wish more people were to understand how vendors work better, so as not to throw the baby with the bath water. Yes, there is very powerful marketing element at work in virtually every vendor. Has to be. They need to differentiate from others in ways that are palpable to the users and easier to understand by the executives. This hype in marketing is not what drives the execution – or even comes close to it – in the good vendors.

The other part of the vendor that most users don’t bother is the product itself. The quiet preparation of a successful product, the development, testing, execution, and the long, tedious work to make sure it does what is supposed to do. Forget marketing, this is about making it do what customers want it to do. This is what takes time (more than 12 or 18 months) and why every 2-3 years you see a good product come out from the vendor, that works and accomplishes what is supposed.

This dichotomy is done at the product level by employing product management people and product marketing people. Guess who has a louder voice? There is some coordination between them, but asking them to work together works only in smaller vendors. As vendors get larger and financial needs shift, product marketing turns up the hype and product management tries to catch up. This also happens when the products become exceedingly complex.

I know I am babbling here, but to get back to my original point: products are not as hyped all the time, but over time they do become what they are supposed to become: good, working, efficient products.

Think about that, and you can see how working with a vendor is a life-long situation for most companies because those that understand the process know that by the time they are ready for an upgrade (hint: not every year) they will get what they need from their vendor.

How can we get back on track? smart corporations know to listen beyond the hype, to create their own lists of requirements and features, and to work with their vendors’ product management people to get them done. They also know there is nothing you can do about hype.

What was that saying? Hype makes the world go around?

I wonder if your analysis could help calm down the effect of the massive marketing stream coming from the big (social) CRM / SAAS vendors. I doubt it, it is a huge tsunami.

And I fuly agree with you that we tend to lose focus on what we are trying to achieve through CRM.

It seems that we are out on building a nice house. And instead of talking to a reputable architect about the design and construction, we go out looking for hammers and tools to build it. That does not sound too smart, does it? I meet lots of customers who are out looking for tools without a good understanding of what they are trying to achieve.

How can we get this back on track again? How can we help decision makers focus on the real (CRM) issues again. How can we help them think over their ways of finding, sustaining and growing profitable customer relations?

Regards,
Robbert.

Thanks a lot for your comments. I agree with your definition of data we are missing, and I think that the “new” business model will have to focus on those to become better as well.

I sense that business are not quite aware, and articles like your balanced scorecard (which I do have bookmarked and I re-read every now and then) are critical for aligning them with what they need.

Analytics (and the data behind it), communities (beyond forums as they are defined today), and reputation are the areas where I will focus my research for 2010.

Thanks
Esteban

Great write-up. Nothing less than expected.

I particularly agree with you about the need to be looking more intensively at social data from all sources and about the need for specialist analytical tools to help do this. As I wrote in a post on
It’s Time for a Balanced Scorecard for Customer Data, social data is just one of three types of data that are currently largely missing from customer analytics (the other two are customer context data and customer needs data). It will be interesting to see how the computational machinery and the analytical tools (as well as the analytical methods) change to cope with the flood of social data, particularly once MobSocNets start to be used by large numbers of customers.

Keep up the great work.

Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
@grahamhill